Two historic coats worn for Winter Carnival activities in the early 20th century were recently added to the Society’s collection.

One of the distinctive “Hudson’s Bay” coats belonged to James J. Hill’s son, Louis, who succeeded his father as president and chairman of the Great Northern Railway. James J. Hill supported the first carnivals beginning in 1886. The festival was revived by Louis Hill in 1916 and has been a highlight of St. Paul’s colorful winter season ever since.

The second coat with similar blanket stripes has a long, full design and was worn by a member of the Great Northern Railway marching club. Both coats date from the years shortly after the 1916 carnival and were probably worn for many years after.

Learn More

• Textile Conservation Lab at the Minnesota Historical Society
• A Checklist for Preserving Your Family Textiles and Clothing
• St. Paul Winter Carnival
• Images of the St. Paul Winter Carnival in the Photo and Art Database

Richardson’s donation to the Society included her uniform and a case that held the gum stewardesses gave passengers to ease ear pain.

Two delightful scrapbooks recently donated to the Minnesota Historical Society chronicle the career and continuing interests of one of the Northwest Airlines’ earliest stewardesses.

Helen Jacobson Richardson worked for Northwest from 1939 until 1942 when, following industry rules, she resigned in order to marry. Her personal memorabilia illuminate the world of the airline stewardess, from the daily routine of life in the sky and professional development to the poise required of these pioneering women and the celebrity they enjoyed.

The passenger airline industry was just developing during Richardson’s time as a stewardess. Her scrapbooks chart innovations, changes, and the evolution of many things we now take for granted: marketing materials advertising new routes and promoting travel, the development of the oxygen mask, unpressurized cabins and the distribution of chewing gum to ease passengers’ ear discomfort, and 30 years of uniform styles.

Job qualifications for early stewardesses were strict, as Richardson recalled in a 1969 Northwest Airlines newsletter, now preserved in her scrapbook. Many, if not all, stewardesses were registered nurses. They had to be “unmarried; age 21—25; 5 feet 2 inches to 5 feet 5 inches tall; weight not over 120 pounds.” Clippings like this, plus the great variety of photographs, luggage tags, tickets, advertisements, correspondence, and flight reports make Richardson’s scrapbooks a valuable time capsule of the ever-evolving airline industry.

Molly Tierney, Curator of Manuscripts

Learn More

• Northwest Airlines Papers, Helen Jacob Richardson, 1939-1992
• Northwest Airlines Corporate Records, 1917-1998
• “Flight to the Top: How a Home Town Airline Made History- and Keeps on Making it:
  the Absorbing 60-year Store of Northwest Airlines” by Kenneth D. Ruble
• Manuscripts Collection, Minnesota Historical Society
• Photographs of Northwest Flight Attendants in the Photo & Art Database 

This is a new donation commissioned by the Minnesota Go-fer Dollies Doll Club as a memorial for Nancy Bergh, former MHS staff member and club member. Annie Wahl, a Minnesota dollmaker, who specializes in character dolls with a very distinctive look, sculpted them from polymer clay with Norwegian regional dress details.

They are delightful and will make you smile.

Linda McShannock, Objects Curator

Send an e-card of the Four Dancing Norwegians

Norwegians in Minnesota and other publications are available at shop.mnhs.org.

Before Bob Dylan headed to New York to become one of the world’s most renowned folk singer-songwriters, he made music as a virtual unknown in Minneapolis while attending the University of Minnesota. Now, an original recording of one of Dylan’s legendary impromptu performances at an apartment in 1960 has found its way to the Minnesota Historical Society Library.

Thanks to Minneapolis resident Cleve Pettersen, the original recording of what fans and music buffs know as the “Minnesota Party Tape” is now available for the first time to the public at the library in the Minnesota History Center in St. Paul.Pettersen was just a teenager in 1960 when he bought his first reel-to-reel tape recorder and spent a lot of time in coffeehouses in the Dinkytown neighborhood near the University of Minnesota. Pettersen wanted to get a local folk singer to sing songs into his new recorder and asked some local musicians who would be willing. A young Bob Dylan agreed to be recorded.Pettersen went to an apartment on 15th Ave. S.E. in Minneapolis and hung out with Dylan, Bonnie Beecher, and “Cynthia”- another local musician and friend of Dylan’s. Pettersen set up the recorder and Dylan casually sang 12 folk songs into it.

Petterson has been the sole owner of the original tape ever since – until he made the decision in 2004 to donate it to the Society for all to enjoy.”The surfacing of this original recording should correct all the rumors and speculation circulating on the Internet and within the circles of Dylan followers and music critics,” said Bonnie Wilson, curator at the Society. “Citizens donating historically significant items and artifacts, such as this recording, have enabled the Society’s collections to grow and make rare works accessible to all.”The play list includes: “Blue Yodel No. 8,” “Come See Jerusalem,” “San Francisco Bay Blues,” “I’m a Gambler,” “Talkin’ Merchant Marine,” “Talkin’ Hugh Brown,” “Talkin’ Lobbyist,” “Red Rosey Bush,” “Johnny I Hardly Knew You,” “Jesus Christ,” “Streets of Glory” and “K.C. Moan.”The original tape is copied onto CD and cassette formats and is now available for listening at the library free of charge. Making copies of the recording will not be allowed.

The library hours are: Tuesdays, noon to 8 p.m.; Wednesday through Friday, 9 a.m. to 5 p.m.; Saturdays, 9 a.m. to 4 p.m.; closed Sundays and Mondays. This recording will become a part of the expansive collections at the Society, including more than 2,000 sound recordings, 4,000 newspaper titles, more than 350,000 photographs, and more than 36,000 cubic feet of manuscripts.

Art elicits many reactions from viewers. It can inspire, evoke strong feelings, or move us to reflect upon its form or meaning. It can also tell us much about the time and place in which it was created, as these examples from the Minnesota Historical Society collections show.Peter A. Peterson or “Whiskey Pete” captured in his woodcarvings the spirit of country life. Born in Alvdalen, Sweden, in 1884, Peterson emigrated with his family when he was about 17, settling in rural Dalbo in Isanti County. This hard-working, church-going, mostly Swedish farm community is where Peterson learned to carve wood. His subjects point to the world and personalities he saw around himself, people like lumbermen, the pastor, and members of a Swedish band and choir. His carvings range from 4 inches to 40 inches, but most are less than a foot tall. They speak to us of the world as seen through Peterson’s eyes.Since the figures are painted, we can only guess at Peterson’s methods and materials. He probably carved soft, local wood such as balsam fir with a whittling tool or small knife. Oral tradition holds that Peterson did not carve for money; he gave his work away, traded it for a few goods, or sold it for whiskey — thus his nickname. After his death on October 21, 1964, these figures eventually found their way to a New York auction house, where the Minnesota Historical Society purchased them as fine examples of folk art. Now they have come back to Minnesota to inspire and remind us of Peterson’s world. (more…)

The Arts and Crafts movement’s values of handicraft and creative expression found fertile ground in Minnesota. Included in the Minnesota Historical Society’s furniture collection from the turn of the last century is this tall, handmade canterbury or magazine rack, made by Anthony Edward Ofstie, a Norwegian immigrant born in 1861. The dark-stained, quarter-sawn oak stand features a square top with marquetry of various-colored woods.Employed for most of his life driving fire engines with Hook and Ladder Company No. 6,Ofstie may have developed his appreciation for woodworking while driving a Minneapolisfurniture-store truck. He and his wife, Julia, enriched their southeast Minneapolishome with furniture of his own design. Among the six pieces in the Society’scollection today are an unusual table and upholstered armchair made of cow hornsand oak. A decoratively monogrammed wooden music-storage cabinet contains a notethat Ofstie handcrafted it for one of his two sons, a heartfelt gift of whichlofty Arts and Crafts theorists surely would have approved.This article was originally published in the Spring 2001 issue of Minnesota History.

Looking at the Great Depression of the 1930s through the eyes of its cookbooks gives a new perspective on food, one of the vital needs of Minnesotans in a time of economic crisis. The Historical Society library has a nice collection of Minnesota cookbooks from the decade, many of which reflect the economic travails of the period.

Minnesotans who lived on farms often had more food available to them than people who lived through the Depression in town or in The Cities because they raised animals for milk, eggs, and meat and grew vegetables, berries, and some other fruits in large gardens. Farm women had the skills, space, and equipment to preserve food when it was ripe and plentiful, for their families’ nourishment and enjoyment after the state’s short growing season. In general, though the 30s were tough on farmers too, food remained plentiful for many, as demonstrated in this charming oversized cookbook published by The Farmer in 1931 to help farm girls learn to cook. The cookbook says nothing about the need to help Mother economize, to stretch ingredients or learn to use less expensive substitutes. It gives recipes and instructions for everything from muffins to a whole meal for the family. And this was published after the farm economy had been in dire straits throughout the 1920s!

People in small towns, on the iron ranges, and even in larger cities also planted gardens and even raised an animal or two for the family table. Cookbook writers and organizations that compiled cookbooks for sale clearly expected town and city women to put up food and probably assumed they grew at least tomatoes, cucumbers, and dill in backyard gardens. These cookbooks encouraged them to emulate their sisters on the farm – without saying so directly – by including large numbers of recipes for canning preserves, pickles, relishes, and sauces.

A frequently seen recipe type in 1930s cookbooks is the “Mock recipe” which attempted to make a desirable dish without using one of the main ingredients that makes it desirable. The best known is probably mock apple pie, made with soda crackers and lots of sugar and spices. The Northwest Housewives Prize-Winning Recipes Book, published by the St. Paul Daily News Home Economic Dept. in 1934, includes a recipe for Mock Maple Mousse that uses brown sugar and water to substitute for the maple syrup and a recipe for Mock Turkey Legs that calls for veal steak and pork tenderloin, molded into the shape of a drumstick on a wooden skewer.

Even during the Depression, the flour millers of Minneapolis still needed to sell their flour. The Betty Crocker cookbooks in the MHS collection show how General Mills encouraged women to use their products in baking and other cooking: the key words here are Bisquick and celebrities. Bisquick combined flour and fat to speed the baking and cooking process; movie stars helped struggling Americans to escape temporarily from their difficult lives. And movie stars using Bisquick – well, the combination must have seemed irresistible to the advertising folks at General Mills. The cookbooks emphasized the glamour of the stars, both men and women, with alluring portraits of the celebrities and their chosen dishes like Mary Pickford’s strawberry shortcake.

Pillsbury started a cookery club to encourage both brand loyalty and more use of flour. The MHS collections only hold one issue, Bulletin No. 2 from November of 1934 – but we’d love to acquire more. The editor was Mary Ellis Ames, whose title was Director of Pillsbury’s Cooking Service. Unlike Betty Crocker, she was a real person who used her own name. (“Ann Pillsbury,” who demonstrates delicious baked goods at the Mill City Museum, came later.) Ms. Ames’s only reference to hard times in this issue is to use the word “practical”. Several recipes provided, like Mexican Pancakes and Almond Marigold Sponge Cake, promoted the use of specialty flours like Pillsbury’s Pancake Flour, Pillsbury’s White Corn Meal, and Pillsbury’s Sno Sheen Cake Flour.
The Russell-Miller Milling Company promoted its Occident Flour with a booklet of Tested Recipes that featured a cross-stitched cover and proclaimed its seals of approval from the Good Housekeeping Bureau, the Farmers Wife magazine’s reader-testers, and the Household Magazine. It appealed to economy-minded bakers by printing a letter that asserted that Occident Flour produced 13 to 28 ounces more bread per 49-pound sack than Flour A and Flour B. Which just might have been General Mills and Pillsbury, but brand names weren’t mentioned.

Home economists often worked at establishments where cooking for large numbers of people was essential. A boon to them was a book called Quantity Cookery, written by two well-known Minnesota home economists, Nola Treat and Lenore Richards. In the 1941 edition of their book, 1st published in the 1930s, they advise: “In Discussing the Limitations in Menu Making the Element of Cost Has Come Up Again and Again. It becomes a definite restriction in institutions that work on a budget, or where the group to be served demands good, wholesome foods at the lowest price.” Examples given are factory cafeterias, school lunchrooms, and restaurants and hotels “whose patrons comprise the lower-income groups”. They then discuss the need to re-use all leftovers, noting “It requires a good deal of ingenuity to use these leftovers in some other form so as to maintain variety and that element of surprise which is so essential.”

And of course, women continued to study nutrition and home economics at the University of Minnesota’s “farm campus.” The MHS library is lucky to have an example of a small cookbook they produced, modestly titled Brain Food. The students used humor in compiling their cookbook, which featured recipes they had solicited from important and well-known members of the university community. University President Guy Stanton Ford had the honor of the first recipe, for a dish called Sunday Night Supper – a bowl of crackers and milk, with peanut- buttered crackers on the side.

A cookbook written by another Minnesota home economist, Mrs. J.B. Graham of Duluth, illuminates the challenges of feeding a family and of making a living on a northern Minnesota farm. 212 Ways to Prepare Potatoes, [1935], establishes Mrs. Graham as a premiere writer of cookbooks for hard times. She lovingly dedicates the book, which sold for 75 cents, to “Our Rural Friends of the Arrowhead. May it Wend its Way Into Every Home and Add Interest to the Homemakers Cookery. May it Help to Bring Prosperity to The Arrowhead Farmer.” The recipes came in large part from the Duluth Chamber of Commerce’s annual recipe contests held during the city’s Potato Week in 1932, 33, and 34. There are recipes for potato breads, muffins, pancakes, and a chocolate mashed potato spice cake, potato doughnuts, fritters, patties, and pies. Cornish pasties and English pasties, dumplings and puddings, soufflés, and sausage, potatoes smothered, creamed and scalloped, hashed and fried. The “foreign recipes” section includes Swedish Kropp Kakor, Norwegian Lefsa, and a savory/sweet Austrian Potato Potica that calls for sugar and cinnamon as well as ham or bacon. The book may have helped many a poor northern Minnesota family through the rest of the Depression by providing a real variety of dishes from one primary ingredient that was inexpensively available.

Debbie Miller, Reference Specialist